75, Not Out: L&T chairman AM Naik talks about life beyond this September

With time not on his side, Naik largely nibbles, rejects a flatbread and goes for the vegetable. In a month and a half, he will be retiring from his executive chairman position in L&T.Suman Layak | ET Bureau | Updated: September 17, 2017, 18:21 IST

Anil Manibhai Naik, chairman of Larsen & Toubro, walks in for lunch and looks at his watch. It is 1.33 pm, and his next meeting is at 1.38 pm. “I will have to finish in 10 minutes,” he says, sitting down at the table nearest to the vegetarian spread laid out in a buffet. He’s at the director’s lunch room on the third floor of L&T’s office in Chakala in the Mumbai suburb of Andheri.

Luckily, the interview with ET Magazine has been done before lunch. A soup is served, and Naik asks what’s on offer. An unsure supervisor indicates it is either peas or broccoli soup. Naik looks up: “You have to tell me what it is... peas or broccoli?”

With time not on his side, Naik largely nibbles, rejects a flatbread and goes for the vegetable. In a month and a half, he will be retiring from his executive chairman position in L&T. He has been with the company for 52 years. From October 1, he will be non-executive chairman, possibly cutting down his work hours by half.

Naik actually sees himself as a “seminon-executive” chairman. He has identified the bits he still wants to do with the company, even incubate a new business that can turn out to be as large as L&T itself someday. And there are the bits he wants to do with his family — take vacations and stay a few days with his children, and spend time on philanthropy, walking in his father’s footsteps.

“I am 75, it is not as if I have many years to go.” Does he recall his first day at L&T? “Of course, it was March 15, 1965. Baker used to sit in a glass office, and I joined as a planning engineer. We had our seats positioned at a right angle to his, right in front of him,” says Naik, referring to ET Baker, the then works manager who hired him, and gesturing with his hands to show how the seating was organised. Naik recalls how L&T was his dream job: “Growing up, we knew only two companies, L&T and Tata.”

Make Room for the CEOWhile his first day 52 years ago is still vivid, Naik is far from finished at the company. The degree of planning that Naik is putting into his next 12 months does not make him look like a man ready to walk into the sunset; rather, he’s more like one walking into a new sunrise as he prepares to begin a three year stint as non-executive chairman.

And to help the new managing director of the company SN Subrahmanyan take over the reins, Naik has a plan: make himself scarce — from India — for a while; come back in time for board meetings and get out again.

“I have mentored him for 12 years, like my son. Now let the CEO run the company,” says Naik, conscious of corporate governance norms and keen to be seen as “noninterfering”. One of the criticisms of Naik in the recent past was his apparent inability to let go, groom or find a suitable successor. Today he carefully explains his stance: “I am calling it stepping aside or making room for the CEO to operate.” While today SNS, as Subrahmanyan is referred to in the company, sits in a room on the third floor with Naik, if he is in the same office, the entire second floor is now being refashioned as the new CEO’s office.

At the end of September, Naik will travel to the US to meet clients of L&T’s information technology and engineering services businesses. That allows him to spend a week each with his son who stays in California and his daughter in Kentucky, something he says he has never done before. He will be back in Mumbai in early November as board meetings start from the sixth of that month. On November 30, he will travel to Perth in Western Australia to meet clients and officers of L&T’s hydrocarbon business.

Naik will then take a seven-day break to see the part of Australia he has never seen before. Following the Australia sojourn, Naik will travel to Malaysia, meet the Petronas CEO, visit L&T’s factory in Kuala Lumpur and come back to India. “The central point of my calendar is which days I am needed in Mumbai. There will be days when I would not be in India at all,” says Naik, stressing on how serious he is about building a distance between him and the CEO’s role.

Naik has carefully carved a slice of action for himself. The chairman is allowed an office. “So I can come anytime,” Naik says with veritable delight. He promises to be around for 35 hours a week (that’s five hours a day for seven days), but is way less than his usual 65 hours, which he says he used to clock. At least two hours a week Naik will be working on a project to incubate a new business that can be as big as L&T someday. He envisages two CEOs working with him on the project once the required licences have been granted, and says he will talk more about it only when they are in place. Naik will also guide L&T’s management on real estate business because he says “it is difficult, and you have to compete with Lodha”.

The current board of directors of L&T, says Naik, has six members whom he formally mentored through a programme. As that batch has ended, Naik has taken up a new one and started mapping the key executives in the company, when they might retire and who might succeed them. The fourth thing on his agenda is an attempt to restructure L&T, delayer the company, make it an operation that is easier to run. It has been his pet project for many years now and is unfinished business for him.

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Six Shirts, Three Suits and…For AM Naik of 2017, however, there is life beyond L&T. He is on a giving mission, building schools and hospitals. “I still have only six shirts, three suits, eight sets of underwear, six neckties and two pairs of shoes. That is why I do not need any money. But I also have it because L&T’s stock options grew 11,000 times. It is a world record. Around 2,500 people became millionaires. I decided to give it all away.”

“There was never a thought in my mind when I started that I will make money. I had thought I will retire and get pension. This is not something I expected,” he adds. Naik says he will continue to live in the company residence in Bandra for the time being, although he has bought a residence for himself in Powai’s Hiranandani.

The act of giving started for Naik sometime in 1995, when he persuaded his father Manibhai Naik to come and live with him. Naik recounts how Manibhai was always ambivalent about his son’s achievements in life with L&T. Around this time, the senior Naik, who had quit his job in Mumbai to teach in the school at his village Kharel in Navsari district of Gujarat, asked his son to contribute towards the village hospital. Naik recalls that the hospital needed Rs 4 lakh at the time and he cleaned up his own savings of Rs 2.5 lakh and borrowed another Rs 1.5 lakh from his provident fund to finance the project.

“My father called me and asked where I got all this money from,” Naik recounts. “He had expected me to give only Rs 25,000. So I had to give him detailed accounts of the money.” Naik says only after this act did his father acknowledge that he felt pride in his son’s achievements. Naik adds that while his grandfather and his father did more than 50 years of public service each, he himself is starting in right earnest only now; his father, he says, has been and will be his role model in life.

Today Naik heads five philanthropic trusts. Two of these are his own creations, another two are trusts created by L&T employees and a fifth one is L&T’s own company trust. Apart from improving schools and hospitals in his village, Naik has also funded a new charitable hospital in Mumbai’s Powai area. He says: “I will pick up two projects every year; education, skill building, or health. Now I am looking at creating an old-age home. I hope I will continue to help society as long as I am alive. When I see how many poor people are benefitted, the satisfaction I get, I cannot get from anywhere else.”

At the inauguration of the Powai hospital, built by one of Naik’s personal philanthropic trusts named after his granddaughter Nirali who had passed away at the age of two and a half, Naik had the pleasure of having both his children as well as the children of his two sisters attending. “All nine of them came. Now, all of them are asking me ‘What will you do with your time?’ All of them are asking me to come and stay a month with them.”

Back at the lunch room, it is 1.40 pm. His next visitor is already seated in the conference room. Mangoes have been served as dessert for the chairman. Naik starts counting the hours he will spend on each of his five pursuits every week. They add up to 34. What will he do with the one hour left? “Oh, that one hour I will spend chatting with you,” he says, and slowly walks out for his meeting.